Quietly, he nodded his assent. Below him, the man gasped briefly, before his soft, low breaths returned.
They stood. Margarete said, almost kindly, “Perhaps it is better if I examine the other cases myself? We will finish here, in Heads, and then you’ll rest. We usually do not bother the dying men in the transept this late at night.”
“Yes, Sister,” he said.
She asked him no other questions. There were seven more cases, all recently arrived. Once or twice, he added something he remembered from his texts, but his contributions only seemed to emphasize his ignorance. Soon he stopped speaking at all.
It was close to ten when they finished.
“Thank you,” she said at last to Zmudowski, who saluted Lucius before he left. He too had been privy to the failure, though mercifully he let nothing show.
For a moment Lucius and Margarete were alone, in the crossing, before the operating table, which he now saw was made from a pair of pews. She looked at him directly now, her eyes appraising, weighing her own options, most of which must have seemed quite poor by then.
She was silent for no more than a few seconds, but when she spoke, he sensed that a decision had been made.
“We will make do,” she said.
He waited, realizing how much he was revealing by not asking what she meant.
And then she added, “Perhaps now you can tell me what happened to your wrist.”
4.
Lucius’s quarters were in the former priest’s house, a separate building that sat across a courtyard spanned by a massive beech tree, its upper branches high as the church steeple. The snow of the courtyard was packed down in paths between the two structures and a third, smaller house with two rooms, one for bathing and one for quarantine. Beyond this he could see a gate marking a graveyard, the crosses barely high enough to clear the snow.
There was a separate entrance to Lucius’s room, but it was locked, and Margarete led him around to a second door, which opened onto a kitchen. There two men sat peeling potatoes next to a set of field stoves and pots. One of them was missing a hand.
“This is Krajniak, head cook.”
A poplar-thin man with a red nose sniffled and saluted with his stump. “Humbly report, Herr Doktor! I hope you like pickled cucumbers, sir.”
“Ah. I haven’t told you that,” said Margarete. “In January they accidentally delivered two hundred kilos of cucumbers instead of cleaning lye. It is not to be mentioned to anyone. Agreed?”
At the far end of the room, the skinned corpses of pigs and chickens dangled from the ceiling. A third man sat in the corner, a shotgun across his lap. Margarete greeted them with a nod. “That one is Croatian, speaks some German. I don’t understand a word he says.”
“The gun is also for the rats?”
“Very good, Pan Doctor,” she said. “I would have thought you’d say it’s for the Russians, but my, you’re learning fast.”
On a plate, she placed a hunk of bread and a pair of boiled turnips, then led him into a second room, a laundry with pots for disinfection, strung with rope from which hung a maze of drying uniforms and blankets. Together, they pushed aside the wet, frozen wool until they reached the door to his room.
It was a small space, four long paces across, with a straw mattress and a sheepskin blanket, a desk, a chair, a wood-burning stove. It had been Szőkefalvi’s room, Margarete told him, and they had left it alone after his departure, waiting for the new doctor to take his place. She went and unlocked the bolt on the far door that opened onto the courtyard. “So you don’t have to crawl through potatoes each time you need to get to bed,” she said. There was a small window, already fogged by their breath, glowing with a gold nimbus from the light of the church. She set his food on the desk next to a casebook, and turned back the blanket on the bed, a gesture which at first appeared an act of hospitality, until he realized she was inspecting it for lice. The blankets lay directly on the mattress. No bedsheets: of course, he thought, embarrassed that he had even noticed.
Inspection complete, she turned back to Lucius. For a moment, he thought she would ask him something else, but she pressed her hands together and curtsied slightly. “My quarters are in the sacristy. There is a bell outside the door if you need to call.” She turned, and then turned back.
“Oh, and, Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t take your boots off.”
“No. My boots…”
“To run, Doctor, in case you need to run. And keep your papers on you—the Austrians have a bad habit of thinking everyone without their papers is a spy.” And with that she hurried into the night.
Lucius set his bag down on the floor and walked over to the desk. The food was already cold, but he was starving, and as he chewed, he turned the pages of the casebook. The names and injuries ran well into the hundreds, all recorded in the same careful hand. He tried to conjure up the man who had preceded him. Margarete had said nothing more about Szőkefalvi, no mention of his age or rank or training. Lucius imagined an older man, because to him all doctors were older men, but now thinking back, he realized there was nothing to suggest the Hungarian wasn’t also a student, perhaps an assistant to the other unmentioned doctor whose crime he suspected by then had something to do with Sister Klara’s. Nothing to suggest Szőkefalvi hadn’t been sent off to serve with just six semesters of study. Nothing, except that Szőkefalvi, whoever he was, apparently had known what to do with a skull fracture, while Lucius knew how to take an X-ray of a mermaid’s spine.
He sat. Thoughts of the mermaid now led to Zimmer, and then to Feuermann, now somewhere in Serbia. Had his friend also been so misled? But the hospital described in Feuermann’s letters, though small, was functioning, with other surgeons and sanitary officers and Red Cross personnel, a steam laundry, an X-ray machine and bacteriological laboratory, not some freezing first-aid station with an armed, half-mad nurse and an operating table salvaged from the pews.
He ran his good hand through his hair and lay back on the blanket, still in his coat. Was he supposed to sleep in his clothes, then, too? He imagined himself fleeing a horde of screaming Cossacks in nothing but his boots. But it wasn’t funny. He felt frightened by everything, the bomb-hole in the church ceiling, the rats like something from a nursemaid’s tale. Was this what his parents had tried to protect him from? Was it too late to ask them to help him to transfer? Oh, but this brought its own worries. If his father had his way, Lucius might find himself a lancer, joining a cavalry charge against a line of howitzers and mortar fire, while he tried to steer an unfamiliar horse.
He turned on his side, his wrist throbbed, and his saber poked into his hip. He had almost forgotten the pain; fear made a good anesthetic, he thought. When Margarete had learned of the injury, she had asked to examine it, carefully touching the tips of his fingers to assess for nerve damage and palpating the fracture to see how it had set. She had given him some vials of morphine from the supply closet beneath the altar. But now he was grateful for the injury, which was all that stood between him and total humiliation. He unclipped the saber and hung it from a bedpost. Yes, he thought: he was lucky for the scuttling child, the icy street. If Margarete was truly performing the amputations, then he could watch her, study, and perhaps, by the time he had healed, he could know enough to start. If a nurse had learned, he thought, then he could, too.
With this thought, he pulled himself farther onto the bed. His feet felt massive in the boots. He closed his eyes. Now sleep seemed futile, but he wanted to be absent, if only briefly, from his fear.
And somehow, he must have slept, for he was awakened by a knock at the door.
It was Margarete again. She wore a second greatcoat over the first, her wimple hidden in the hood, dusted now with snow.